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These are the slides to my 10 minute talk, "Navigating Archival Silence" for the panel "Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities" at the 2013 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. http://www.adelinekoh.org/blog/2012/04/02/racend/
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Navigating Archival silence: creating a nineteenth century postcolonial archive
Adeline KohDuke University and Richard Stockton College
#mla13 #s239@adelinekoh
The Archive & Power• Archives as forms by which knowledge is made visible/
knowable
• Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge
• rules: limit possibility of knowledge
• Derrida: Archive Fever
• “achrontic power”
#mla13 #s239@adelinekoh
Digitizing “Chinese Englishmen”
• Demo of “Digitizing Chinese Englishmen”
• Currently in alpha form at http://chineseenglishmen.adelinekoh.org
• Attempt to create a “postcolonial” nineteenth-century digital archive
#mla13 #s239@adelinekoh
Archival Silence in the 19th century archive
• 19th century studies--undergone digital revolution in creating digital archives (NINES.org, Swinburne Project etc.)
• But little that explores the colonial history of the 19th century
• “Digitizing Chinese Englishmen” attempts to deal with this archival silence
Who are the ‘Chinese Englishmen’?
✤ Anglophone Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore and Malaysia
✤ Torn between two Empires: Qing Chinese and British
✤ Privileged class of non-Europeans
✤ Bourgeois intermediaries
5
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The Straits Chinese Magazine
✤ Modeled after Blackwoods and Macmillans
✤ Upper-class periodical to give voice to Chinese diaspora of Malaya
✤ Edited by Song Ong Siang and Lim Boon Keng
6
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Designing a Decentralized, “Postcolonial”
Archive
- “Decentralized” archive--> modes for democratic access and exchange-”Postcolonial” refers to Edward Said & postcolonial studies collective of the 1980s, more of a mode of criticism than time period
#mla13 #s239@adelinekoh
A “Postcolonial” 19th-century Archive?
• A ‘postcolonial archive’ is one which examines and questions the impact and creation of imperialist ideology within the structure of the archive itself
• Elizabeth Povinelli--investigate the compositional logics of the archive
• Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu, Thomas Nygren: an archive which interrogates traces of colonialism & apartheid in knowledge production
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The Structure of Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’
• Subject matter--> allows for more comparative structures of similar hybrid dynamics across 19th century European empires
• Spinoffs: “African Englishmen,” “Indian Englishmen,” “Caribbean Englishmen” etc...
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The Structure of Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’
• “Hypertext” linkages, use of tags, provide different types of reading
• May “open up” text to different interpretations
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The Structure of Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’
• Comments field-- “Opening up” of archive
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CMS Shift
• Now hosted in WordPress
• Shift to Scalar: http://scalar.usc.edu/
• metadata will be tagged in RDF format, allowing others to interact easily with the archive
• Scalar: allows comments to play a more central role in determining the structure of the archive
#mla13 #s239@adelinekoh
Social Media & “Chinese Englishmen”
• Twitter account: @CEnglishmen
• Twitter hashtag: #CEnglishmen
• Future: Tumblr blog?
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To Summarize
• “Digitizing Chinese Englishmen”--an attempt to think through creating a postcolonial archive
• Through attempts to be self-critical of knowledge formation
#mla13 #s239@adelinekoh
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